Let’s Not Live With a Sea of Rubbish

By K.P. Waran

THERE are countless stories of “messages in bottles” from all over the world that are incredible and heart-warming.

I jumped into the sea after a whole day of sailing recently to cool off from the scorching sun and literally bumped my head into a bottle. My heartbeat raced as I grabbed it to see if there was a special message in it for me only to be filled with disappointment as it was empty.

As I swam back to the yacht, I remembered the Kevin Costner and Robin Wright Penn movie in the late 1990s on the same subject and told myself that I should look up similar stories.

In 1956, a Swedish sailor named Ake Viking was bored while on a ship far out at sea and dropped a bottle overboard with a message asking any pretty girl who found it to write to him. A Sicilian fisherman picked it up and passed it to his daughter Paolina. They thought it was a joke but Paolina decided to send a note to the young sailor.

She was pleasantly surprised to find out that Ake Viking existed. The correspondence quickly grew warm and Ake visited Sicily and they fell in love after their first meeting. Paolina and Ake were married in Sicily in 1958, thanks to the far-travelling bottle.

In 1937, Daisy Singer Alexander (heiress to the Singer sewing machine fortune) put a message in a bottle and tossed it into the Thames River near London. Twelve years later, it washed up on a beach in San Francisco, where it was picked up by an unemployed beach comber named Jack Wrum.

The message: “To avoid any confusion, I leave my entire estate to the lucky person who finds this bottle, and to my attorney, Barry Cohen, share and share alike.” – Daisy Alexander, June 20, 1937.

Wrum’s share was US$6 million and an income of US$80,000 a year from Alexander’s Singer stock.

In Florida, almost five years to the day that Roger Clay died in a motorcycle accident, his parents got one last message from him – a sun-scorched note he had stuffed in a bottle as a child and set adrift in 1984. A man found the bottle in a canal on July 4, 2003, and returned it to Clay’s mother.

Roger was 7 years old and on vacation when he tossed the tape- sealed Pepsi bottle into the Gulf of Mexico from a pier in Clearwater, just north of St Petersburg in Florida with the note: “To whoever finds this letter please write me a letter and let me know,” the note said in shaky pencil. The note included his address and the date was Dec 27, 1984. Roger died on July 10, 1998, nine days after his 21st birthday.

When the bottle turned up behind Don Smith’s home on Tampa Bay, he set out to find the boy. With the help of the St Petersburg Times he learned of Roger’s death.

Don Smith said he was determined to find the parents, adding: “Imagine what that message would mean to them.”

Roger’s mother, Lisa, said she dreaded her son’s death anniversary every year “but now I have something wonderful to think about. Here I am, trying to escape Roger’s death, and he reaches out and gives me this message, this gift.”

The stories brought goose bumps but also elation at the incredible journey these bottles travelled carrying notes of hope and bringing happiness to those who found them. My thoughts then travelled back to the bottle that I had found and I burst out laughing.

I realised that even if there was a bottle with a message floating somewhere close to our shoreline, the chances of anyone retrieving it and becoming ecstatic is very slim. That is because there are millions of bottles, mostly plastic, floating along our coasts apart from other paraphernalia.

It is not a phenomenon that is confined to Malaysia as garbage has been discarded into the oceans for as long as humans have sailed the seven seas or lived on seashores or near waterways flowing into the sea.

Since the 1940s, plastic use has increased dramatically, resulting in a huge quantity of nearly indestructible, lightweight material floating in the oceans, close to jetties and eventually being deposited on beaches.

Agencies and associations clamouring for environment protection, especially for waterways and the seas, have identified that sources of marine debris include items that are brought to the beach and left there by beach-goers and garbage deliberately or accidentally discarded by ships at sea or from offshore oil platforms. They also include material carried to sea by rivers, especially from large coastal cities with city storm sewers. A significant source of solid waste enter the sea from land sources.

Imagine jumping into the sea and coming to the surface only to find plastic cups with sticky syrup, plastic sheets with remnants of nasi lemak, boxes with half eaten pizza, wrappers with sticky chocolate, used toothbrushes and other paraphernalia all around you.

While there has been increased awareness about keeping our waters clean, many still continue to indiscriminately dump things into rivers and seas with scant regard of the consequences – killing marine life and choking the waters with garbage especially plastic bottles. Scientist say it takes about 450 years for each plastic bottle thrown into water to dissolve if they are not swallowed by big fish.

According to reports by environment protection agencies, fish, birds, marine mammals, reptiles and other animals can get entangled in discarded or lost nets that continue to do what they were designed to do – catch living animals – but now they catch them indiscriminately, a process called “ghost fishing”.

Items unintended for fishing become traps. Woven plastic onion sacks floating in the sea have entrapped endangered hawksbill sea turtles. Plastic bags become invisible to birds diving for fish and are skewered by the birds’ sharp bills, usually resulting in their death.

Plastic is also mistaken for food and is eaten by birds, turtles and even whales. This can choke or poison them, or simply make them think they are full.

Of course, not all plastic floats. In fact, around 70 per cent of discarded plastic sinks to the bottom. According to Greenpeace, around 6.5 million tonnes of rubbish lie below the surface of the world’s oceans. Land- based sources are estimated to account for around 44 per cent of the pollutants entering the sea.

Over the week, I was happy to meet Chris-Kingsley Smith and his wife Sherrine who have been sailing around the world for the past 11 years on the boat Amandla Star (which means freedom in Zulu), landing in exotic places such as Majorca, Gibraltar, the Canary islands, the Caribbean, Bermuda, New York, Florida, Bahamas, Panama and Colombia. They were captivated by the natural beauty of Langkawi.

On their boat they have a strict policy of throwing nothing overboard. Guests on their boat are not allowed to even empty the ashtray into the water.

“There is a tendency among people to insist anything that is natural can be thrown into the sea. What is so natural about a cigarette butt? What happens if they end up in the stomach of fishes and turtles? During my journey here, I have seen mountains of garbage floating in the sea and it is sad that very little is being done about it.

“Everybody goes about their lives thinking, one day when they wake up, all the rubbish will just disappear. I want to knock some sense into their heads and tell them it will not go away. Something concrete has to be done to stop the flow of materials into the waters,” he said.

Sherrine, who is adept at winching the main sail in as she is in cooking up a storm, says anything that is brought from land should return there to be properly disposed of.

What will it take to make people believe that the Earth is also our home. While we are conscious about keeping our home and its immediate surroundings clean, there is little thought about keeping mother Earth unpolluted.

As much as we want to blame contractors who tip their garbage trucks into streams or pristine jungle so that they do not have to make the long trip to the landfill, there is also little or no effort among our population to separate recyclable rubbish when it lands in the rubbish bin.

Let somebody else do it seems to be the accepted notion. There is that popular story about the four people – Everybody, Somebody, Anybody and Nobody goes.

Everybody thought Somebody would do it, Anybody could have done it, but Nobody did it. Well, Somebody was very angry and upset because after all, it was Everybody’s job. Everybody thought Anybody could do it, but Nobody realised that Everybody would not do it. So, Everybody blamed Somebody and Nobody asked Anybody!

Such lackadaisical attitude would mean that one day we all will be overwhelmed by the rubbish that we throw on land and in the sea.

What we need to do is start demanding more responsibility from each other in the way we go about discarding things. Stop living as if everything is disposable and that the future will not be impacted.

At the same time, there is a need for a concerted effort to clean up our beaches, waterways and the seas that surround us. It may be an expensive exercise requiring a huge allocation (which hopefully would not go through some middleman), mobilising a large workforce, including volunteers, and getting it done before “the shit hits the fan”.

It is not just for us but also our future generations who will inherit whatever we leave behind for them – including the garbage.

(c) 2008 New Straits Times. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.